True meetings and resistance against the taken for granted

A co-teacher sent me this blog post debikeytehartland.me/a-hundred-languages-for-describing-what-is-the-reggio-approach/ as a prompt to re-think our relationship with (and what recall) the Reggio Approach. She reminded me that I had written about this issue before. Since I'm suffering from terrible writer's block I thought I'd repost a couple of blogs I wrote on the subject. I'd love to hear your thoughts!
Here is one of the posts; atelierista-being-reggio which is copied below. The comments on these are also worth reading, so click the link if you wish to see those. 

"Have you noticed that there are a ton of Pinterest and Facebook posts about 'doing Reggio' these days? In one way it's great that so many people are looking for inspiration, but I worry that the exquisite praxis we can see in the infant toddler centers and preschools in Reggio Emilia are being misinterpreted. Sometimes in talks educators from Reggio remind us to "look beyond the furniture", and I think that's good advice. At its root, the Reggio Emilia approach is a big old Ikea basket full of educational theory put into practice- put into beautiful, well considered and co-constructed practice, with lots of listening and the ethics that come from a deep respect for humankind backing it up. To me, the reason it's so worth looking to Reggio is that all of the beautiful work is carefully thought out and negotiated and presented so that it never, ever betrays the children.

 
Don't the practices and environments in all the beautiful photos of activities, tabletops and shelves lose their meaning if not accompanied by the careful thoughtfulness described in The Hundred Languages of Children? It seems to me that it's really all about ideas and relationships, rather than wood and wicker, fabric strips and bubble wrap. And no matter how many times I've arranged the materials in jars of rainbow colors, I know that they'll either stay up on the shelf in pristine sortedness, or get dumped out and mixed up, because that's what people do when they are looking for four matching bottle cap wheels for a cardboard batmobile.

How do you look for meaning in a learning experience?
I try to look for a big idea that can connect across time and subject area. Dewey's ideas about educative experiences (which connect) and mis-educative experiences (which are without context) can really help me. A mis-educative experience is one that doesn't connect the learner to the wider world. This lesson or experience might have some benefit for children (like practice with fine motor skills), might be "agreeable or exciting in itself" but doesn't lead to "richer experience in the future" (Dewey's words). By tying school experiences to relationships and big, universal ideas, the teachers in Reggio Emilia avoid banal, stifling mis-education. And so can all of us.

*(Praxis (process), the process by which a theory, lesson, or skill is enacted, practiced, embodied, or realized.) "

And another;

atelierista-true-meetings-and-resistance-against-the-taken-for-granted
A couple of Sabot staffers went to Calgary for a conference, and came back talking about what and who they had heard, including speaker Harold Gothson. In the book Childhoods; a Handbook, part of which is available as a google book, Gothson has a chapter called 'Appropriating Reggio Emilia; from Cults to Cultural Constructions'. 

Reflecting on being influenced by the Reggio Approach, he asks the question "What happens with ideas and narrating of experiences when they travel from one context to another?  What happens with the idea, and what happens with the receiving context?"

The narrating of experiences -the story -changes with the context. I can't really know what it was like in Calgary, but I can hear the stories they will tell me about it and form my own image. In this way I can learn from their experience. In thinking about the Reggio approach, or even old Sabot preschool, I can listen to the stories (even the ones I tell myself), and apply what I get from them to my new context. Gothson writes that he views Reggio through his Swedish eyeglasses, just as I view everything through my metaphorical eyeglasses, and so do you.
Gothson goes on to talk about looking for new points of view in order to challenge your own established ones. He talks about the benefits to educators of challenging personal perspectives by looking at other schools and other ways of doing things. He writes that Reggio educators look for disturbances, seeking out "contexts that make them uncomfortable and force them to reconstruct and develop their ideas... in the ongoing effort to find new confusing and provoking encounters to make it possible to create resistance against the taken for granted."


I'm not sure about the translation here, but the way this is worded does capture something about disequilibrium, the feeling people get before we understand something new. It does feel uncomfortable, confusing and provoking sometimes. 
We have to understand that ideas must change with the context and that the place it is to be taken to will also change. So that's why there is no Reggio Emilia 'program' or 'method' that can be implemented anywhere. 


Gothson writes "all narrations are built on interpretation, choices and interests.. and invite a complex and contradictory reality that surrounds every decision of action and thinking in general." . 


Does that mean we take what we want from our inspirations, or that we take what we need? 
Either way, it implies that we must give careful consideration when reconceptualizing an idea in a new context, resisting "superficiality and rigidity".
This year, having moved the school across the river into a new building, the preschool staff is finding out what parts of our long story still work in the new context. I really like experiences that cause me to question my habits, provide 'resistance against the taken for granted" and make me think critically about my point of view, but  the feeling of starting all over again from scratch is very unsettling. Luckily there is a group that can work together to represent this old story and create the new one.


While reflecting here, I started to think about truth. If what we know is just our version of a narrative, can there be such thing as truth? Gothson writes that there is no "Reggio Emilia", just our interpretations of it.


It turns out that there is a social constructivist theory of truth, that truth is constructed by social processes and is affected by context (according to wikipedia.org), which I never thought about until now, but which seems about right to me. 


For me it comes down to a commitment to the value and values of children. How to make that visible in our community and culture is what brings me back to the inspiring ideas from the schools of Reggio Emilia again and again. 


Gothson has more to say about values; Read it here books.google.com